Recent Comments

About

Owner of PageF30.com.
Translator of Demian by Hermann Hesse into English - an interlinear translation for German students and those who want to see the original text.
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/mithradates
Fluent in Japanese, Korean. Proficient in Mandarin, Turkish, German, French, Portuguese, others.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Some news here in German from a few days ago on how the numbers of students learning German is continuing to decline. With German I have always stated this to be a positive thing for anyone measuring the economic benefits of learning a language, since German is a language that is concentrated in a particularly small and well off area. With a language like Russian "fewer students are learning Russian" usually means "people in former Soviet republics are electing to stop using Russian" whereas with German it simply means fewer people are learning it.

That is, Germany and its economy aren't going anywhere and fewer students learning German means less competition for positions for non-Germans that require such a skill.

From the article:

The number of people who learn German outside of Germany is declining: according to statistics from the Goethe-Institut, in 2010 there were around 15 million people learning German, compared to 20 million ten years before. In Russia alone the number of people learning German over this period of time has dropped by one million.

Just for fun, let's take a look at the fifteen largest economies during that time to see how things have changed.